Five Crazy Headlines

Marriage can be rough. Especially when your spouse hires a couple of hitmen to kill you.

Balenga Kalala of Melbourne, Australia paid for three men to kidnap and murder his wife, Noela Rukundo, when the couple were in Burundi for the funeral of Rukundo’s stepmother. The hired men took Rukundo from her hotel, but they did not kill her because they knew her brother and they also did not believe in killing women. Instead, they told Rukundo they had been hired by her husband before they released her.

Rukundo made her way back to Australia and crashed the funeral service that was being held for her. Her husband had told people that she had died in an accident.

Kalala plead guilty to incitement to murder and was sentenced to nine years in jail.

Source: The Washington Post

I’m getting too old for this shadow

Manitoba, Canada’s top predictor of the weather this spring, died shortly before she would have made her prediction.

Just days before Groundhog Day, Winnipeg Willow, a groundhog that had been used in the tradition of predicting when spring will arrive, was found dead in her enclosure at the Prairie Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre.

Willow was born in 2010 and was brought to the center after her mother was killed by a dog. Groundhogs live on average four to six years.

Manitoba’s spring time weather predictions had to be made instead by groundhogs Manitoba Marv and Brandon Bob.

Source: The Weather Network

Hello, please hold … forever … and ever … and ever

How often are you put on hold? According to a recent study, over the course of your life you may spend over a month on hold.

In a survey from the text message service TalkTo, more than half of Americans say they spend 10 to 20 minutes every week—or 43 days of their life—on hold.

Marchex, a mobile advertising analytics firm, also released a survey in which they said that Americans will spend more than 900 million hours on hold this year.

Source: MarketWatch

Catching mice for over a century

In 1861, a mouse trap was manufactured in England by Colin Pullinger & Sons. Last week, 155 years after it was made, the trap claimed its latest victim.

The trap was on display at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, England when museum workers discovered it had caught a modern day mouse.

The museum is currently debating whether or not they will preserve the mouse and make it a permanent part of the display or if they will remove the mouse and bury it.

Source: CBC Radio

I’m about to go on trial, but until then, wanna buy some drugs?

When is the best time to make a drug deal? For 35-year-old Christopher Durkin, the answer apparently was inside the courtroom.

Durkin was in court facing a driving with a suspended license charge, when he spoke with a man in the courtroom’s seating area and allegedly offered to sell him Suboxone pills.

The man told officers about the attempted sale, and when deputies stopped Durkin they found the drugs in his possession.

Durkin now faces two counts of possession of a controlled substance and one count of possession with the intent to deliver a controlled substance.